Responding to Unexpected and Expected Outcomes: Moderating Effects of Team Familiarity and Team Experience
Abstract
While failure and success have important implications for individual and organizational performance, not all failure and success are equally significant in influencing performance. A key, but unexamined, element is one’s expectation of the outcome. Individuals and teams commonly harbor expectations for their tasks, which may significantly impact their responses to failure and success. Hence, we categorize failure and success into unexpected and expected outcomes and investigate how these differently influence team performance. Furthermore, team familiarity and team experience may play a crucial role in shaping teams’ responses to the discrepancy between the outcome and expectation. When interacting with unexpected outcomes, both positive and negative effects of team familiarity and team experience on team performance may exist simultaneously, forming a double-edged sword effect. Therefore, we further explore the moderating effects of team familiarity and team experience on the impact of unexpected outcomes on team performance. Our empirical analyses use data from National Basketball Association (NBA) games and associated gambling information from 2014-2015 to 2022-2023. We find that unexpected failures improve team performance more significantly than expected failures, while unexpected successes decrease team performance more significantly than expected successes. We also find that team familiarity and team experience exacerbate the negative impacts of unexpected successes on team performance. Collectively, these findings provide theoretical and practical insights into the pivotal role of expectations in understanding the nuanced impacts of failure and success on performance and offer a more comprehensive explanation for the performance implications of team familiarity and team experience.
Note: Research papers posted on SSRN, including any findings, may differ from the final version chosen for publication in academic journals.
https://kenaninstitute.unc.edu/publication/responding-to-unexpected-and-expected-outcomes-moderating-effects-of-team-familiarity-and-team-experience/
